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Stephen Darori

Stepen Darori is the maqnaging Partner of 3Xc Global Partners. Stephen is the lead Principal of 3XC Capital. Stephen Darori has been Chairman of the Darori Foundation since 1988. In June 2012 he founded Start Up Nation Critical Canvas.

Stephen Darori

Stephen Darori is the Managing Partner of 3XC Global Partners. He is the Lead Principal of Darori Capital Luxembourg. Stephen has been the Chairman of the Darori Foundation since 1982.

The Darori Foundation is the largest donor of books to Israeli ( and also South African) University, College and Municipal libraries and has consistently been so since 1969. The Darori Foundation , given the decreasing demand for hard copy books in the 21st Century Digital age , now leads and participates in Projects to put Internet Devices in Every Child in Israel. In 2013 , $5 million was earmarked to upgrade the notebooks used in schools in the Southern Periphery Towns within 20 kms of Gaza . IBM (Corp) quietly committed them selves to matching finance ( in kind) . The new IBM notebooks are purchased at almost cost to IBM (substantially discounted ) . Lets not start a turf war in Zion between IBM Israel ( franchised sales rep) and IBM Corp . Keep the later information as confidentiality as possible. Over and above Notebooks and other Internet Devices , free ISP services are provided and have been upgraded to a 100 Mega Down-link.

Stephen is also the founder of the Start Up Nation Critical Canvas. This is a Socio Economical Political Lobby to change the employment Laws in Israel and open up the Job Market to High Tech People who are not Jewish or Israeli. the pitch is simple . Israeli Academia can now longer keep pace with the Demand of the Start Up Nation's White Silicon City 's Silicon Boulevard, the Golden Silicon City and the Silicon Wadi's demand for High Tech Headcount. This is an extremely difficult Pitch to deliver as all decision makers wear two or more different Caps . The pitch says let them work in Zion, pay taxes , enjoy all the benefits of an Israeli Tax Payer but never Israeli Citizenship unless they marry an Israeli. The Tax System for individuals in Israel is structures around an Israeli ID Number. No ID number , no opportunity to work in Israel . Medical associations have a boutique solution for non-Israelis living in Zion who require medical treatment

Facebook hit a major milestone with today’s Q4 2013 earnings as it crossed the halfway point and now earns 53% of ad revenue from mobile, or $1.37 billion of its $2.59 billion in revenue this quarter. The small-screen skrilla comes from 556 million daily mobile users up from 507 million in Q3, and 945 million monthly mobile users up from 874 million. Overall, Facebook hit 757 million total daily users and a cool 1.23 billion monthly users up from 1.19 billion in Q3.

Facebook reached 49% of ad revenue from mobile in Q3 2013 up from 41% in Q2 and 30% in Q1. But now 53% of its $2.59 billion in revenue came from mobile. On the earnings call, Facebook said Q4 was its first billion dollar mobile ad revenue quarter, and it made nearly as much on mobile in Q4 2013 as it did from mobile and desktop in Q4 2012.

The boost has been driven by Facebook’s mobile app install ads that help developers get their apps discovered outside of the cluttered app stores. This quarter Facebook also introduced new mobile app re-engagement ads that can get users back into apps they downloaded and forgot about. “This is working even better than we hoped” COO Sheryl Sandberg said on the earnings call.

While many predicted the mobile era might kill Facebook, the company has made a remarkable shift on the business side to take advantage of the new medium where others have faltered. Because users spend so much time in Facebook’s News Feed and it knows so much about them, it can show well-targeted, relevant, full-screen ads that bring in good rates. That’s helped every geographic region see total revenue increase of 65% or more over the year.

As for user growth, Facebook’s mobile-only user count increased significantly from 254 million in Q3 2013 to 296 million in Q4. That could mean Facebook users are ditching their desktop entirely, or it’s just recruiting more mobile-only users in developing nations where desktops are scarce.

While Facebook’s total monthly user count increased 3.36% this quarter and 16% year-over-year (172 million), in the US + Canada it only grew 1% from 199 million to 201 million in Q4. That signals Facebook is reaching saturation in those markets and may have begun to lose steam with younger demographics.

On last quarter’s earnings it admitted that it saw “a decrease in daily users specificallyamong younger teens” which caused its share value to drop 15%, erradicating growth it made from strong Q3 financials.

Until now, advertisers on Facebook have only been able to bid on campaigns on either a CPC or CPM basis. While this has been an effective way for businesses and brands to bid for ads, there is no guarantee that clicks and impressions actually lead to conversions. To capture more performance marketing spend, Facebook is introducing a new option to bid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis.

CPA bidding is available today on a global basis through Facebook Ads’ API, and according to Marketing Land will soon be available in the Power Editor and Ads Manager. Currently, marketers are able to do CPA bidding on three types of ads or actions:

This new option to bid on a CPA basis will operate as a maximum bid, but as with all CPA bidding, advertisers may actually pay less than their max bids. Facebook says this benefits marketers by offering more “predictability” in their ad spending. This option is also better than bidding with CPM or CPC, as bidding with CPA guarantees lead generation and facilitates conversions. By paying for an actual action – such as an offer claim, rather than just a click on the offer – advertisers are assured that there is actual value in their campaigns. Despite all the hype of social advertising benefiting “brand awareness,” the bottom line of any campaign should be to produce a positive ROI. With this new CPA option, advertisers on Facebook can now actually see – and only pay for – ads that perform well and lead to a positive ROI.

Of course, if you’re still convinced that CPC and CPM bidding is better for your brand, don’t worry – Facebook isn’t replacing these options with CPA. Advertisers will still be able to choose these options when creating campaigns.

In Taking Facebook Public, Reshaping It Around Mobile Phones, Chief Gained Focus on Bottom Line

MENLO PARK, Calif.— Mark Zuckerberg needed help. Facebook Inc. FB +0.38% ‘s initial public offering in May 2012 had been a mess. And after turning a website born in his college dorm room into a company valued at $100 billion, the young chief executive was under pressure to prove he could sell lots of ads on smartphones.

Facebook has seen its shares rise and revenue from mobile ads jump up. How did CEO Mark Zuckerberg turn the company around after its ill-starred IPO? Evelyn Rusli joins digits. Photo: AP.

So he went for a long walk a few weeks later through the center of Facebook’s corporate campus here with Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a top engineer at Facebook and friend who once was Mr. Zuckerberg’s teaching assistant at Harvard University.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to build a billion-dollar business in six months?” Mr. Zuckerberg asked. He wanted Mr. Bosworth to help lead the company’s shaky mobile-ad business, then bringing in almost nothing. Another part of the job: figure out all the ways Facebook could make money.

Ads didn’t sound like fun to Mr. Bosworth, but his boss persisted. Soon, the engineer was filling in the blanks of a spreadsheet that grew to about 80 pages long. The entries became the manifesto of an in-house project that Mr. Zuckerberg called “Prioritization.”

Interviews for this article with the CEO, Facebook directors and executives, and dozens of other engineers, friends and former employees laid out how Mr. Zuckerberg’s growing attention to the bottom line was part of a sea change by the often-stubborn, idealistic 29-year-old chief executive once called “toddler CEO” in Silicon Valley. Taking Facebook public and reshaping it around mobile phones forced him to grow up.

“It’s a story of a vertical learning curve,” says venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a Facebook director and longtime adviser to Mr. Zuckerberg.

Introducing WSJD, the Journal’s new home for tech news, analysis and product reviews.

Interactives

Mr. Zuckerberg still wears jeans and a T-shirt to work, drives a black, stick-shift Volkswagen GTI and keeps the temperature in his glass meeting room, known as the “aquarium,” near 68 degrees to keep everyone alert. As a holiday gift, friends of Mr. Zuckerberg got socks decorated with the image of Beast, his white, woolly Hungarian shepherd.

Yet Mr. Zuckerberg has learned to embrace—or at least accept—the reality that he now is in charge of what might be bluntly described as the most visible advertising business in the world. It is a big leap for the college dropout who wrote in a letter to potential investors just before the initial public offering: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company.”

He embraced the idea in 2012 of selling more ads in Facebook’s prized “news feed,” the center of the screen where the social-networking site’s 1.2 billion members spend most of their time. The news feed is a constantly updated list of stories from people and pages followed by a Facebook user.

The intensified focus on advertising, long shunned as less important than the photos and status updates posted by users, generated a surge in new revenue from corporate giants such as McDonald’s Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT -0.79% Analysts expect Facebook to announce later this month that its revenue jumped more than 40% in 2013 compared with a year earlier. About $3 billion of the company’s revenue—or more than one-third of the overall total—likely came from mobile advertising.

Facebook shares jumped 105% last year, compared with the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite’s rise of 38%. On August 2, the stock climbed back above its IPO price of $38, erasing a $50 billion slide in stock-market value. Facebook closed Friday at $54.56 a share.

Still four months away from his thirtieth birthday, Mr. Zuckerberg is worth about $20 billion. Last month, he pocketed about $1 billion in his first stock sale since Facebook went public, and separately he donated about $1 billion in stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Mr. Zuckerberg bristles at the view of some people close to him that he has changed as a CEO. His primary mission still is to connect the world digitally with Facebook. “It drives me crazy when people write stuff and assert that we’re doing something because the goal is to make a lot of money,” he says.

Even in his most self-reflective moments, what Mr. Zuckerberg sees is a series of logical moves and adaptations that are part of what he calls a “continuous trajectory.” In an interview, he paused abruptly after saying the words “business review.”

“Uh, I’ve never used that term before,” he said with a smile.

Despite all the improvements, Mr. Zuckerberg must show that Facebook can out-innovate a steady stream of upstarts. Investors were rattled in October when Facebook reported a decline in use among young teenagers, some of whom are migrating to newer mobile-phone apps such as Snapchat. Snapchat messages automatically disappear in 10 seconds or less.

Last fall, Mr. Zuckerberg approached Snapchat with a takeover offer for more than $3 billion. Snapchat’s 23-year-old chief executive said no. Facebook previously tried to create a similar app called Poke, with Mr. Zuckerberg even contributing some computer code, but the project flopped.

A secret project called Firefly included a “social” phone that was to be created with HTC Ltd. of Taiwan—but was killed by Mr. Zuckerberg in mid-2012 because of glitches, according to people who worked on the project. An app for Google Inc. GOOG +0.21% ‘s Android operating-system mobile phones, known as Home, has failed to gain momentum since last spring’s debut, despite a big publicity push by Facebook. And a smartphone released by HTC and based largely on Firefly’s design has been a dud.

Nasdaq’s board in Times Square in New York on Facebook’s trading debut Associated Press

Just a few years ago, Mr. Zuckerberg paid little attention to many of the numbers that are obsessions to shareholders. In 2010, he said there was “no point right now in having a massive profit.” He boasted that the ad business “factors in, like, not at all” to decisions about Facebook’s operating platform and user services. His No. 1 goal: increase the company’s total membership to one billion users.

“If you brought up revenue in an argument with Zuck, you would lose automatically,” says one former senior employee. He recalls being chided for mentioning revenue while discussing a new product. Mr. Zuckerberg says such comments are a reminder that Facebook was designed to care more about its mission than money.

At the time, most Facebook users looked at the site on a desktop computer. Ads usually were banished to the right-side gutter of the screen, the Facebook equivalent of Siberia.

By the end of 2011, though, the surging popularity of smartphones was causing Facebook users to spend less time on computers. “The IPO process surfaced how fast the mobile shift was happening,” says Facebook director Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and one of Facebook’s earliest investors. Executives worried that Facebook was falling behind at an alarming rate.

Internal data showed that many users were so frustrated by Facebook’s mobile software that they would quit the app and use their tedious mobile Web browsers to reach the social-networking site instead.

The smartphone shift also was a problem for Facebook’s ad business. There was no easy way for the company to relegate ads to the side of small screens, and Facebook had no mobile ads to sell anyway. Meanwhile, efforts to sell older types of ads on desktop computers were starting to lose their punch as more users embraced mobile devices.

“We pulled the lever, but this time, it didn’t work,” recalls one senior employee about 2012’s first quarter.

Just before Facebook went public in May 2012, Mr. Zuckerberg walked into the “aquarium” and did something that surprised everyone.

A group of Facebook engineers presented the latest mock-ups of ads for Facebook’s iPad app. The ads were marooned on a separate screen—and to the right of the news feed.

The CEO quietly studied them. “Why don’t we just explore ads in news feed?” he said, according to people at the meeting. Mr. Zuckerberg indicated that he would be open to the possibility of more types of ads there, including ones not tied to “likes.”

“Oh, my gosh, he’s actually open to it,” one executive present at the meeting remembers thinking. No one in the room asked Mr. Zuckerberg why. They were too worried he would change his mind.

“It’s not like I just decided to get more involved in ads,” he says now. “I needed to because basically the ad product had to be more integrated.” He adds: “And that created all these hard decisions that we needed to do well.”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s willingness to upend even what some people close to him describe as sacrosanct beliefs took on more urgency after Facebook’s bungled IPO, which subtracted more than 25% from the share price in its first 10 days of trading.

In public, he tried to play down the importance of the stock price. Mr. Thiel now says the CEO was more worried than he let on, citing the risk that Facebook employees who owned stock might get discouraged and quit. “I care about this because I want to retain my people,” Mr. Zuckerberg told senior executives in a private meeting.

Facebook’s first earnings report, which hit analysts’ targets but disappointed investors who wanted even more, sent the stock into another tailspin. The mood of some employees darkened.

A worried Mr. Zuckerberg asked Facebook executive Mike Schroepfer, one of his most trusted lieutenants, to interview engineers about morale. They were frustrated about the plummeting stock price and worried that top management couldn’t relate to their financial stress because those executives owned so many Facebook shares that they were rich despite the stock’s slide.

Mr. Schroepfer, usually an unemotional software engineer, choked up when he presented the results to a room full of engineers. “I know you are fathers, parents. I am, too, and I know that you have to think about putting your kids through school,” he said, according to someone at the meeting.

Mr. Bosworth, the Facebook engineer who agreed to help Mr. Zuckerberg hunt for new revenue, worked on his spreadsheet for about 1½ months, quizzing scores of employees. Around the same time, Mr. Zuckerberg began assigning revenue targets to certain product teams. Previously, he resisted the idea because he worried managers would become too fixated on money.

Over the next several months, Mr. Zuckerberg also grew to fully embrace putting “nonsocial” ads, or those that aren’t tied to a user’s “likes” or other signals, in the news feed. The shift came after Chris Cox, Facebook’s vice president of product, showed the CEO internal data that suggested his previous resistance to nonsocial ads was hurting Facebook’s business.

Tests by the company showed that adding nonsocial ads improved the overall quality of Facebook’s advertising for users. “At the time, it kind of struck me as a crazy idea,” Mr. Zuckerberg says, since those ads veered away from Facebook’s traditional word-of-mouth-based pitches.

The CEO even compromised on a subject where he had rarely budged before: user experience.

Mr. Zuckerberg told Mr. Cox that some decline in usage would be an acceptable trade-off for higher ad sales, as long as Facebook made improvements elsewhere that more than offset the decline. The first test showed that more ads reduced user activity by 2%, below a target of a low single-digit percentage, while overall “engagement” rose by a much bigger percentage. Engagement is a broad gauge of user activity.

Facebook’s sales gain of 53% to $1.81 billion in the second quarter was the company’s largest jump ever. In July, a beaming Mr. Zuckerberg addressed most of the company’s more than 5,000 employees. “We did a good job,” he said. “We’re figuring this out.” A few days later, Facebook shares drifted above their IPO price.

Mr. Zuckerberg now meets often with Facebook’s biggest advertising clients, often spending hours with them. He has told customers to message him with ideas, which he will consider incorporating into product decisions.

At a visit last summer to the headquarters of Facebook ad client McDonald’s in Oak Brook, Ill., he learned how to cook an egg-white breakfast sandwich and asked the head of french fry taste tests why one batch he tasted looked a few shades lighter than fries served in McDonald’s restaurants.

Her answer: French fries sold at McDonald’s are cooked in oil that has been through multiple fry cycles. Mr. Zuckerberg said: “You have the greatest job ever.” His own Facebook page has long been peppered with McDonald’s and Chicken McNuggets references.

This year, Mr. Zuckerberg will have to wrestle with how to avoid turning off some Facebook users with too many ads, as some critics have warned. Some investors are antsy for Facebook to wow users with something new.

Mr. Zuckerberg says he is aware of the risks, but notes that user activity still is rising. The company does more than 35,000 surveys a day to monitor user sentiment, and the “driving force behind everything is that we’re trying to build the best experience for mobile,” he says.

Some of the changes at Facebook remind him of walkways at his old high school, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. As a student, he was befuddled by a meandering path to the campus cafe. The route seemed strange, so Mr. Zuckerberg did some research.

The answer? “Instead of choosing the path up front, they kind of waited and saw where people walked and put a path where people walked,” he says.

With every algorithm update, Google is making SEO more and more complex. The company has expressed its desire to improve the quality of their search results, filtering out spammers and content of lower relevance — but how that ‘relevance’ is determined is becoming increasingly difficult to understand to a definitive degree. The elements that are regularly highlighted by Google are ‘quality content’ and ‘genuine engagement’.

The issue with quality content is that it’s less scientific. Less certainty in the process means more research, more work and, ultimately, more investment to ensure best results for your online presence. This can be a frightening prospect for companies — you can’t just go to Google Adwords and ensure all the relevant search terms are included on your webpage, you need people to be actually reading your content to up that relevance rating. Real people and real engagement.

The one metric that is totally clear is the need for social engagement. How many ‘Likes’, ‘re-Tweets’, webpage links — these elements are being weighted more heavily by search engines. The social media aspect, which used to only form a part of the SEO puzzle, is becoming more influential. The idealistic result of this is that users get a better quality experience all round, but the underlying motivator is that, over time, organic results will be diluted to the point that brands will have to pay to get best ROI. The only way to combat this is to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms. But what’s the best way do you do it? How do you know that the content you’re investing in will give your company the best results? Here are a couple of points to keep in mind:

Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them. You can’t just load up your company website with a heap of updates on what the company’s doing, how you’re helping clients, etc. These are all sales pitches and, in the majority, these won’t be widely read. You’re caught up in the corporate culture and the internal wins and losses, so the temptation is to write about them, show the people how good the company is, sell them on that culture that you, yourself are invested in, but you need to take a step back and think about what the clients want to know. What are the articles you’re reading each day? What is of interest to you, as an industry expert? What are the things clients need your services for? If you are not an industry expert, not following all the relevant influencers in your field, then you need to be and you need to be viewing their insights from the client’s point of view. Inform clients of industry trends and updates, write about positive stories in which your brand has had an influence, but always be wary of the sales angle. Social media is about building relationships, rather than booking sales. The more you’re able to establish the first, the easier the second will become.

Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, real storytelling, actually getting to the humanity of something, rather than corporate messaging. All businesses affect the lives of real people, many in very positive ways, and these stories are gold. They are not only great to tell, but they show the genuine passion of your brand. If you can express that passion in an engaging way, you can create strong, shareable stories that will help expand the reach of your business, which has benefits across all aspects. Take time to think about different angles to your corporate stories, try and find the heart and humanity in what you do as a company and where your brand is able to help. And again, make it story first, corporate messaging second. You don’t need to sell to your clients straight up, you’re working to establish a connection, to communicate on a deeper level.

Take time to engage in your online community. It’s one thing to use Twitter to respond to client concerns and queries, but you shouldn’t stop there. Look to have a presence on all social media platforms and in their respective communities, become part of them, participate where you can. You’ll often see a company representative drop into a conversation on Twitter or Facebook with no real introduction, saying ‘give me a call at *** and we can help you out’. This is not real engagement. You’re likely to build better customer relationships if you talk to people on a human level, offer advice and links to online articles (not necessarily your own company content) and show them that you’re theexpert in your field. The opportunity to convert these contacts into clients will come, you don’t need to rush it. By being present and being a trusted part of the conversation, you will establish better relationships for ongoing business. And be honest and positive, at all times. Going online and trashing your opposition, using a half-truth to initiate a business conversation — these tactics do not benefit the establishment of ongoing partnerships.

As with anything, the approach you take will vary dependent on the industry, but the way to solidify your online presence, making your company more resilient to SEO algorithmic changes and enabling you to make best use of social media, is through the creation of engaging content and the establishment of trusted networks. It takes time and investment, but it will pay off, over and over again.

It’s interesting reading the many discussions on what Facebook will be in 2014. The social network has become an integral part of people’s lives, personal and business, and the latest changes to its NewsFeed, filter algorithms and advertising models have many nervous about what to expect. It’s hard to say whether the changes will have a positive or negative effect on the user experience – which is what the company is touting as the main focus of their changes – though it is clear that Facebook is riding a very fine line between necessary profit growth and ongoing user demand. Here are a few of the major changes and their potential impacts:

1. The addition of play-now video ads in your NewsFeed. This one is being flagged as a major concern from regular, non-business users. The addition of play-now video ads has already begun, with a number of users now seeing these come up. You scroll past them and they mute out and you can go on with what you’re doing, but the potential annoyance factor is high. Annoying enough to turn users away from Facebook? Not likely, but definitely one which would seem to have more impact on the user experience than benefit. This addition opens up a whole new revenue stream for Facebook, so it makes perfect sense that they would be going down this path, but it could be the beginning of the end, depending on how it’s adopted. Possibly.

2. Changes to the NewsFeed algorithms to improve ‘quality’ of user experience. This has been an extremely contentious issue, though one not all regular users are fully aware of. Facebook’sEdgeRank algorithm weights the relevance of all updates that appear in people’s NewsFeeds. This may mean that status update you just posted will not be seen by all your friends, which somewhat goes against the ethos of Facebook in the first place (though the impacts of updates from ‘Friends’ is relatively minimal). Facebook has expressed its intention to create an online newspaper type feel to the site, with the content tailored to you, but a part of that is the addition of, effectively, an editorial process and the rules governing what appears and what does not are tricky. The underlying motivation is that Facebook wants to push businesses towards paying to reach their followers and fans by diluting their ability to connect to those who’ve ‘Liked’ their brand-page organically. This is likely to become more prevalent in 2014, which will drive more businesses to funnel users towards their own websites and away from Facebook. The impact of this is impossible to determine, but it really highlights that fine line Facebook is tip-toeing.

3. The focus on targeted advertising. As with the changes to the NewsFeed, Facebook is hoping more users will interact more with ads to give them more data on what they want, enabling them to improve their individual experience by ensuring the ads they see are of relevance to them. The problem is, most regular users don’t see Facebook as an advertising medium – they want to connect with their friends, not be confronted with sales pitches. Advertising is a necessary part of the business, and as Facebook grows, so does the impetus for increased revenue generation. The underlying idea of targeted ads makes sense, that Facebook wants to ensure they’re not spamming users with stuff their not interested in, but the practical roll-out of this model is problematic. The other potential impact is for small businesses – Facebook has announced that it will focus on small business advertising to capitalise on the millions of small business pages it’s currently hosting – which they, of course, need to do, but as they push towards a paid advertising model, how will those small businesses compete against bigger players for space? And if all of them want to pay for targeted ads, will there be enough room for users to share content with their friends?

No doubt Facebook has some of the answers to these questions, while others will be causing the executives headaches every day. It would seem way too early to be predicting the demise of the largest social network in the world, but some have suggested the writing is on the wall. While the changes will introduce a raft of new challenges for business, they also bring new opportunities which, if utilised well, will remain a key part of any brand strategy. But they also highlight the need to remain active on other social networks and monitor the progress of user migrations, staying in touch with more audience share whilst also leveraging against potential fall-out from ongoing Facebook updates.

Two users say Facebook is too vague about how it uses private message data.

With all the pieces of my master plan falling into place, Ars will soon be silly with Likes.

Facebook is being sued by two users for intercepting the “content of the users’ communications,” including private messages, with the intent to “mine user data and profit from those data by sharing them with third parties—namely, advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators.” The plaintiffs argue in a December 30 class action complaint that Facebook’s use of the word “private” in relation to its messaging system is misleading, given the way the company treats the info contained within those messages.

Many of the allegations in this case are based on research done in 2012 by the Wall Street Journal for a series of articles about digital privacy. Facebook is far from the first company to use private messages to mint money. Gmail continues to be dinged for creating text ads based off of the content of e-mails ten years after the ads were first introduced. (And Gmail has been sued for that, too.)

This is from 2010, but without the “with” that is no doubt just beyond the crop, it’s still relevant.

Facebook goes to lengths to clearly distinguish its messaging feature as “private,” even calling it “unprecedented” in terms of the privacy controls, the filing alleges. “Facebook never intended to provide this level of confidentiality. Instead, Facebook mines any and all transmissions… in order to gather any and all morsels of information it can about its users.”

Facebook’s privacy policies have been going through data aggregation creep for the last few years. The site was discovered to be handing over user data to advertisers in 2010, including names and user IDs.

The company overhauled its privacy policy 18 months ago to describe the liberties it takes with the information it collects—most user interactions are logged, aggregated, and shared (with anonymizing) to third parties, including data brokers and advertisers. Facebook also pointed out it would share anything users ever made publicly available with apps, games, or partner websites, and deleting that information from Facebook would not remove it from those partner databases.

FURTHER READING

They do disclose consumer types like “credit reliant” and “resilient renter.”

The plaintiffs describe how Facebook effectively “clicks” on links within Facebook messages, an activity that it doesn’t explicitly disclose to users. The lawsuit claims Facebook crawls the linked page to see if it contains one of Facebook’s “Like” buttons. If so, Facebook registers that private-message link as a “Like” on the relevant site’s Facebook page—a strange example of turning a private communication public. The lawsuit also claims that Facebook “uses a combination of software and human screening to comb through private messages” to mine for user data for broader uses, including selling to third parties.

The plaintiffs do cite the section of Facebook’s data use policy where the company explains what information it “receives” about a user as they interact with the site, including sending and receiving messages, searching, or clicking on things. But they argue that Facebook’s data use policy doesn’t make clear that Facebook “scans, mines, and manipulates the content of its users’ private messages… in direct conflict with the assurances it provides to its users regarding the privacy and control they should expect.” Likewise, the data use policy does not make clear that “Facebook will register the fact that a URL is communicated privately… as a ‘Like’ for a particular web page,” reads the filing.

For Facebook’s alleged transgressions, the plaintiffs are seeking more than $100 for each day of violation or $10,000 per class member of the lawsuit, as well as statutory damages of either $5,000 per class member or three times the amount of actual damages, whichever is greater.

The lawsuit is based on an older anti-wiretapping law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, as well as California state laws. Civil lawsuits over privacy issues have proliferated in recent years. Many of those lawsuits have settled, but it’s not clear whether pre-Internet privacy laws would be successful at trial in barring the data gathering of modern companies.

I could not be bothered to roll a FB account, and anyone who does is kind of foolish to think they have some recourse against the scamming, credit card stealing, marketeering, privacy invasions and sexual abuse that are the hallmarks of FB. Clearly, these two did not read the Terms of Service they so willfully consented to when they signed up.

What? I agree about the part about marketeering and privacy invasions, but don’t you think you are exaggerating a bit.

I could not be bothered to roll a FB account, and anyone who does is kind of foolish to think they have some recourse against the scamming, credit card stealing, marketeering, privacy invasions and sexual abuse that are the hallmarks of FB. Clearly, these two did not read the Terms of Service they so willfully consented to when they signed up.

There’s so many bad things about facebook, do you really have to wildly exaggerate and invent things?

That only weakens the arguments of the sane people who get grouped in with the crazies

I burned out on Facebook pretty quickly. It was neat to hear from old high school acquaintances for a few months, then my timeline started filling up with advertising and updates on friends’ FB game progress, and the UI was so cluttered to begin with I just got tired of looking at it. I had a brief spurt of using it again when I got my first smartphone, and the mobile UI was cleaner, but i just drifted away from it again and never installed the app on subsequent phones. I still use Twitter regularly, and I used Google+ when it was new.

But I’m not the most social person to begin with, so I probably never used Facebook to it’s fullest potential. And I went through a rough couple of years in my personal life and got tired of reading about how everyone else was having so much fun with their lives and families while I was working through cancer, money issues, etc. But I guess I can’t hold that against Facebook.

The question I should have been asking at that time was how do I delete my Life account?

I just checked my Activity Feed, and compared it to a recent message I sent containing a link to a Huffington Post page that would shock me if it didn’t have a Like Button and… no ‘like’ is present.So what are they actually talking about?Last edited by BioTurboNick on Thu Jan 02, 2014 7:18 pm

Am I? I’m mostly speaking from personal experience here. I cleaned up a woman’s computer who got served “teh malwares” from facebook linkspam, and found out she was actively communicating with a scammer at the time (via FB, of course). For another woman, I had to assist her with recovering from an account hijack (she had her number linked to a cell phone, which she burned, the number got reissued and the new owner of said number hijacked the account). So yeah, I have firsthand, seen evidence of most of the above without having ever been on FB myself (the marketeering and privacy issues, I gleaned those from the headlines more than anything ). Thus I stand by my previous statement… Oh, and don’t even get me started on FB’s sexism. Don’t think there’s much debate that any internet community is toxic to the fairer sex (okay, maybe pinterest gets a pass in that regard).

The things you’re describing don’t seem specific to Facebook at all. Those are internet problems that seem to happen anywhere people gather together on the internet. All the slimy underhanded stuff just uses whatever vector is most popular to get to people, and Facebook fits that bill. End users just need to be smart enough to not click on linkbait, whether on Facebook or in email or anywhere else.

Ooh, what’s that bright flashing ad off to the side of this website that says I’ve won a prize? Must… not… CLICK…

edit: Not THIS website. Ars is so damn good about reacting to complaints about annoying ads that I haven’t seen anything but the classiest ads here in yearsLast edited by bdp on Thu Jan 02, 2014 7:27 pm

Am I? I’m mostly speaking from personal experience here. I cleaned up a woman’s computer who got served “teh malwares” from facebook linkspam, and found out she was actively communicating with a scammer at the time (via FB, of course). For another woman, I had to assist her with recovering from an account hijack (she had her number linked to a cell phone, which she burned, the number got reissued and the new owner of said number hijacked the account). So yeah, I have firsthand, seen evidence of most of the above without having ever been on FB myself (the marketeering and privacy issues, I gleaned those from the headlines more than anything ). Thus I stand by my previous statement… Oh, and don’t even get me started on FB’s sexism. Don’t think there’s much debate that any internet community is toxic to the fairer sex (okay, maybe pinterest gets a pass in that regard).

Sounds like you work in IT or PC repair and routinely have to interact with people who fall for those stupid things… so that would put a huge bias on your personal experience without having used Facebook yourself. Do you assume the internet is only good for giving people computer viruses and Nigerian money scams?

So yeah I also think you are blowing those things out of proportion even though its not all roses at FB.

Yet another reason to quit using Facebook (and Google, because they do the same thing). I HIGHLY recommend that everyone quit using Facebook and Google. Instead, consider using Ravetree, DuckDuckGo, and HushMail. These are excellent services that have excellent privacy. There are many other privacy-based services for you to choose from, but these are the ones I like (as do a lot of other people).

Hey! I know you – you’re the bot who posts the EXACT SAME THING over at Reason.com

Yet another reason to quit using Facebook (and Google, because they do the same thing). I HIGHLY recommend that everyone quit using Facebook and Google. Instead, consider using Ravetree, DuckDuckGo, and HushMail. These are excellent services that have excellent privacy. There are many other privacy-based services for you to choose from, but these are the ones I like (as do a lot of other people).

LOL you really just suggested HushMail??? Go google HushMail and its “privacy” adherence. (hint, they turned over people’s “private encrypted” emails to the government)

Does anyone know of a program that can rip all my images from Facebook? I would love to keep all the images I’ve uploaded over the years but delete my Facebook account. I will need to recreate one due to being a part of the design industry, but I intend on keeping it purely professional.

Does anyone know of a program that can rip all my images from Facebook? I would love to keep all the images I’ve uploaded over the years but delete my Facebook account. I will need to recreate one due to being a part of the design industry, but I intend on keeping it purely professional.

Under Settings, in the General tab, there’s a link titled “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”

All sarcasm aside, I wonder how much validity this case has. How much privacy can someone realistically expect in most social media?

I don’t see why you would expect any. You’re using Facebook to communicate, ergo Facebook has your communication. If it says somewhere that your DMs or whatever are not scanned for info then there’s a case though.

I guess this isn’t ideal, but I also don’t see how anybody could expect anything less from a social networking site that makes their money off of advertising – let alone Facebook. Nothing is private fully, and never will be.

“Many of those lawsuits have settled, but it’s not clear whether pre-Internet privacy laws would be successful at trial in barring the data gathering of modern companies.”Our snoopy government agencies like the NSA certainly believe that past precedent is applicable. It will be interesting to see if past precedent applies to everyone equally. And by everyone I mean including folks that can’t afford to give their representative a little something extra.

Does anyone know of a program that can rip all my images from Facebook? I would love to keep all the images I’ve uploaded over the years but delete my Facebook account. I will need to recreate one due to being a part of the design industry, but I intend on keeping it purely professional.

Under Settings, in the General tab, there’s a link titled “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”

I hate the way Facebook tied all the p2w games that will annoy the shit out of you and force you add mass friends. Did you know there is a limit to how many people you can remove from your friends list in one day?
I was sucked in and ended up adding over 4000 people for Superhero City which I quit after EA bought them out. I’m down to 1100 and only 1095 to go.

Sounds like you work in IT or PC repair and routinely have to interact with people who fall for those stupid things… so that would put a huge bias on your personal experience without having used Facebook yourself. Do you assume the internet is only good for giving people computer viruses and Nigerian money scams?

So yeah I also think you are blowing those things out of proportion even though its not all roses at FB.

Nah, these were personal favors. When I did computer repair, Mark Zuckerberg was in high school and myspace/friendster were in vogue. I’ve moved on, thank god, but yes, seeing my idiot friends fall victim to this kind of thing I have to ask, “why do you subject yourself to this, this whole thing (FB) is just inherently abusive?” They usually say connect with relatives/old friends, but that doesn’t really interest me since 1. I hate people, and 2. my parents/grandparents don’t facebook either. The way I learned the internet was “you don’t reveal yourself, period, because the internet is evil incarnate and you have to operate under a pseudonymous persona to protect yourself from the internet.” I think that is truer now than ever. FB, G+ and Twitter fly in the face of that, so yes, I lump them in with all the naughty shit I saw happen to people back in the old days. I’ve been keeping score, and determined that they are indeed up to naughty shit, of a narcing and marketeering variety, thus my negative opinion has been reenforced thousands of times by media articles, personal observations, and, above all else, Maltego.

I just checked my Activity Feed, and compared it to a recent message I sent containing a link to a Huffington Post page that would shock me if it didn’t have a Like Button and… no ‘like’ is present.So what are they actually talking about?

When you send a link in a private message, Facebook automatically crawls the page you’re linking to; and if it sees a Facebook “Like button” plugin on that page, it increments the page’s “Like” count by one.

While this does seem strange, it can hardly be considered a breach of privacy, as it happens anonymously; there’s no way for the outside world to tell who the one person is.

Yet another reason to quit using Facebook (and Google, because they do the same thing). I HIGHLY recommend that everyone quit using Facebook and Google. Instead, consider using Ravetree, DuckDuckGo, and HushMail. These are excellent services that have excellent privacy. There are many other privacy-based services for you to choose from, but these are the ones I like (as do a lot of other people).

I feel kind of nervous with these privacy respecting free services that you’re describing. If they’re free, how are they paying for their servers, bandwidth, etc? At least with Facebook and Google Mail you’re getting a “free” service at the cost of privacy, and you can read the privacy policy and make a decision with respect to whether or not you use the service, but if a particular service isn’t sponsored by government tax payers, supported by donations, a non-free service, or offered as a promotion for a larger set of services (such as free for personal use but paid for business), how are they paying the bills?

Okay, so help me out here, just a little bit on the basics, please. Again, what is the meaning of the word “is”?A truly bizarre aspect to all of this is that people sit around fabricating these totally inane planes of “alternate reality” so that they can justify their intended behavior as being completely plausible & accepted in a small anteroom of some realm of “a reality” despite that reality having a probabilistic likelihood approaching Zero.The absolutely most bizarre aspect to any of this is that Goldman Sachs & their ilk appropriate obscene quantities of money doing the same thing through engineering the privatization of profits on publicly underwritten promissory notes.

If you doubt this last assertion, please provide a concise & comprehensible description of derivatives, derivatives markets & the means of regulating the same.

Okay, so help me out here, just a little bit on the basics, please. Again, what is the meaning of the word “is”?A truly bizarre aspect to all of this is that people sit around fabricating these totally inane planes of

Hey,
Quit whining.
Our ‘legal’ team has prepared 500 pages of documents,
Precisely, so you can educate yourself on what the meaning of word IS actually is.

Likewise, the data use policy does not make clear that “Facebook will register the fact that a URL is communicated privately… as a ‘Like’ for a particular web page,” reads the filing.

If his were me – I’d post a shitload of nasty – creepy – very offensive – horrible links – just to see if anyone is paying attention.

Otherwise – yawn. Anyone posting anything online should expect zero privacy. Adobe – has several online services that work in conjunction with it’s products – their fine print clearly states that ANYTHING that a User uploads to their servers can and most likely will be used for advertising purposes at some point – to showcase a given product. They state that by putting anything on their servers that they are entitled to a copy of said content and that you agreee to not file any litigation against them for using any uploaded material.

It’s the same thing sa filling out a form for a sweepstakes or winning a prize – any information you give them can and most likely will be used how ever the fuck they want.

People are blind – ignorant and dumb if they expect any privacy in a public medium.

If you don;t want your shit public – stay the F off the Internet !!

Quote:

Many of those lawsuits have settled, but it’s not clear whether pre-Internet privacy laws would be successful at trial in barring the data gathering of modern companies.

Why not ? Many copyright trolls are using outdated laws to their advantage in recent years.

Hell – it’s still illegal for me to let my sheep graze on Boston Common on Sundays – I’m sure technically I could be fined. How far back does that law go ?

Also – you’re on a mystical acid trip if you truely think all 1 Billion + Accounts that FB likes to toot it’s own horn about are completely unique Users.

I maintain 4-5 FB accounts for my employer along witha co-worker – who has his own personal account in addition to 2 other acounts for his private business. At minimum that is 7 right there among 2 people and our place of business. I have many clients that have a personal and business account. many major corporations have multiple accounts – colleges / universities have many accounts for each department. We can scale that into the 1 billion account range if you really want to bother doing the math. The short is I’d bet ±45% of FB accounts are actually 1:1 – the rest are extreneous.

Also – you’re on a mystical acid trip if you truely think all 1 Billion + Accounts that FB likes to toot it’s own horn about are completely unique Users.

I maintain 4-5 FB accounts for my employer along witha co-worker – who has his own personal account in addition to 2 other acounts for his private business. At minimum that is 7 right there among 2 people and our place of business. I have many clients that have a personal and business account. many major corporations have multiple accounts – colleges / universities have many accounts for each department. We can scale that into the 1 billion account range if you really want to bother doing the math. The short is I’d bet ±45% of FB accounts are actually 1:1 – the rest are extreneous.

To say nothing of the number of accounts that are just generated by spambots.

You are both right, of course. That does not stop from trying to get a better deal with setting limits to non-privacy.

I do not understand that fatalism, “I can claim nothing” / “I am a miserable small worm” . My employer holds all the keys about my pay rise, and, still, I ask for a rise from time to time. And, you know what, sometimes I get it.

Does anyone know of a program that can rip all my images from Facebook? I would love to keep all the images I’ve uploaded over the years but delete my Facebook account. I will need to recreate one due to being a part of the design industry, but I intend on keeping it purely professional.

Under Settings, in the General tab, there’s a link titled “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”

Double appreciated, deleted my account completely. Well, it takes 14 days for the account to go from ‘deactivated’ to ‘deleted’. Got all the information from my account in a handy little zip file. Had all my messages/videos/pics/contacts. Again, been meaning to do this for a while, can’t thank you enough.

So if I message a link to a friend, Facebook then connects to that page and looks for the “like” button and (if they find one) simulates a click on it.Assuming that is true, does anyone know where I can find out what pages I’ve “liked” without actually consciously clicking on the like button myself? The “likes” link on my profile is empty.